A Textbook Case is a classic, perfect case or common example of something, and what my father did to my daughter was what you would consider textbook grooming.
Anytime you are going through a trauma that involves circumstances you have never experienced, you cannot help but reach out in every direction for information, trying to learn everything that you can.
It’s the reason my wife and I know so much about SJS (Steven Johnsons Syndrome), Mucosal lining breakdown, corneal scarring, Intravitreal injections and eye lid reconstruction. That’s what happens when your child ends up in an ICU, and they tell you this is just the beginning of something. You try to learn everything you can about it, to prepare yourself.
But you can never really prepare yourself. You can never be prepared for the 100’s of doctors visits, procedures and surgeries that follow for years.
Now I do a completely different type of research based on pedophilia, incest, child abuse, grooming, laws, penalties and common defense tactics for child abusers etc..
I never wanted to know about SJS when my son was going through it. Knowing the possibilities was awful, knowing my 10-year-old son could lose his eyesight was terrifying.
Likewise, I have never wanted to know about grooming, incest and child abuse, or how the pain, anger and confusion from it tears families and relationships apart.
I didn’t want firsthand knowledge of the justice system, police detectives, child advocates, prosecutors, forensic exams or defense tactics and juvenile court.
And there really is no way to prepare myself for standing across from my father in a courtroom, knowing what he has done to my daughter, and how it will affect her entire life.
To understand what my daughter has gone through, I pulled several articles on incest and grooming tactics and had her go through them, highlighting the things my father had done, the things that were relevant and marking them with an age.
Early on I realized the fracturing of my family was a textbook case of what happens to a family that experiences incest and abuse, it is very well documented. I didn’t realize how well documented, until a coworker I had confided in, told me what happened to her family and it was almost identical in every way to what has happened to mine, and so I began researching the affects of incest and child abuse on victims and their families and there it was, in multiple publications and studies, a perfect description of my family and everything we were going through.
The anger, the denial, the explaining away, the confusion, the mistrust, the blame , the guilt, the silence and even the desire to tell your story, are all very real and experienced by everyone that goes through this.
It was as if someone had written a script and we were all part of some twisted Lifetime channel drama, that is still playing out,with no end in sight.
When my daughter was done highlighting the article it was shocking. It gave her a better idea of how all of this happened. She and I were both surprised to see just how textbook this was, as if my father was following some “how to” guide on child grooming and incest.
The grooming techniques my father used on my daughter
The goal of grooming a child for sexual abuse is about creating a relationship, where the victim will not question what is happening or that they are even being victimized.
It is a long-con, that requires a certain amount of effort where the perpetrator is, in it for the long haul. It involves Gaining someone’s trust over a long period of time and once you have their complete trust—finally taking advantage of it.
They use different techniques to create a web of confusion, guilt, obligation, with warped and distorted boundaries that they have created for their own personal gain.
For my daughter it started when she was around 11.
On our visits to my parent’s, house 3-4 times a year for a week each time, my daughter had few people her age to play with. My son would spend the night with his cousins who were close in age, and my daughter would feel left out. All her time would be spent at my parents’ house. She had already developed a close relationship with them through the years and I never gave it a second thought.
But my father did, and when my daughter was 11, he started exploiting it.
He would hint at being her boyfriend and if they were the same age, they could get married.
He would touch her a lot in a tickling, playful way.
She would always sit next to him on the couch watching TV.
He made her feel special and he lavished with gifts and affection.
This first method or technique is about Exploiting a Child’s Need for Affection or Approval
It is on one of those visits where his hands would start going towards other parts of her body but not quite. When she felt uncomfortable and started to leave the room, he told her she didn’t have to and to stay.
This is the first sign of my failure as a parent.
My children were naïve in many ways. My wife and I protected our children. We knew who they were with and when they were with them. We were like hawks in that regard, but not with my family and certainly not with my father. We should have been more vocal about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. We should have had more of those conversations.
My daughter was 16 when all of this came out, she is 17 now and while she is very smart , her therapist made the comment how sexually naive she was…saying it is rare these days, and not a bad thing , but that my father was able to exploit that.
Something else that also came out of those sessions was that my daughter had a “people pleaser” personality.
People pleasers tend to have a history of maltreatment, and somewhere along the way, they decided that their best hope for better treatment was to try to please the people who mistreated them, in this case my father. Over time, for them, people-pleasing becomes a way of life.
This second method or technique is Exploiting Emergencies or Vulnerabilities
When my daughter was 12, my son went into ICU at the local children’s hospital due to a reaction to medication called SJS. Within 24 hours we knew were in trouble and this was just the beginning of something much bigger than we had realized. My parents rushed to our aide, allowing my daughter to stay with them for weeks while my wife and I did shifts at the hospital. My parents were the only ones I trusted with such a huge request, and my father was given free reign over my daughter for 3-4 weeks, while we were in the worse crisis of our lives with my son.
My daughter came back severely changed from that trip. I will never fully understand what took place emotionally, or psychologically between the, but my father built a very strong bond with her. It is also when he started talking about much more adult and sexual things, and his touch and fondling started moving beyond her shoulders and back. He gave her secret gifts and money. He spent time with her they talked, he made her feel very special when she was very alone.
For months after my daughter returned to us she received odd gifts in the mail from my parents, little things, like bags of gummi bears, etc., but they were always addressed to my daughter, with no mention of my son, who was still recovering from weeks in the hospital. I always thought it was an oversight, but it struck me as odd, even then.
When I think of what he was doing and planning, my only response is “Dear God what have I done!?”
The third method or technique is Exploiting Authority or Social Standing
When I say my father was loved and respected by everyone who knew him, I am not exaggerating. When I say he gave to anyone and everyone, I am not exaggerating. When I say I loved and respected him more than any other man I have ever met in my life, I am not exaggerating.
But when he told my daughter I would never believe her, he was lying.
When he told her we would be nothing without him, he was lying.
The fourth method or technique is Subverting Parent/Guardian Boundaries
I had no idea this was happening until I asked my daughter about it after reading about grooming. When my daughter would get in trouble, or lose her phone for a week as punishment, my father would be there to pick her mom and I apart. The goal is to drive a wedge between child and parent with the groomer painting themselves as the only one who understands. My father and I spoke everyday so he always knew when my daughter had gotten a bad grade or was in trouble, and he was able to use that against us and against her.
The fifth method or technique is Secret keeping
This starts out small, candy money, gifts that you aren’t supposed to tell your parents about. This is a test to see if the child can and will keep these harmless “little secrets”. Those secrets grow with time until they can be used as a form of emotional blackmail. He would tell my daughter secrets and get her to tell him secrets that he could use against her.
The fifth method or technique is Gift Giving
My parents have always been very generous, so this was hard to spot. But my father had been giving “secret” money and gifts to my daughter for a long time. My parents also helped us out financially with the kids’ school and were generous in other ways, and he told my daughter how much of what she had was because of him and that we would be nothing without him. The goal is to create a feeling of indebtedness, with the idea that they will be able to collect on that debt…it starts out with small tokens, a peck on the cheek or a photo. Each photo or token becomes a bit of blackmail that they can ultimately use to get what they really want. When this had reached its peak of my father’s perversion, he was buying my daughter jewelry, lingerie and sex toys to use on her.
The sixth method or technique is Age-Inappropriate Interaction
This involves not treating the child like a child, but instead transitioning them to an adult. It involves using conversation and language that are beyond the child’s emotional age and understanding. It involves the use or pornography and talking about sexuality in a way that is meant to desensitize them. Trying to get the child to talk about there own sexual feelings and genitalia in order to strip away childhood innocence. My father would ask my daughter to look up inappropriate things on YouTube to see what her reactions was, she didn’t even know what she was looking up until she got to the site.
The seventh method or technique is Using Guilt, Teasing, and Threats
My father had been guilting and teasing my daughter in a sexual way, under his breath and in secret since she was 12. Last summer when she was 16 and everything got much worse, he threatened to kill himself if she went to the police or told anyone.
The eighth method or technique is Exploiting the Child’s Own Curiosity
Children are curious about their bodies, and the feelings they find in their solitary explorations are entirely normal; parent know this and give the child adequate privacy to learn about themselves. My father tried to use that and appropriating my daughter’s natural curiosity at a young age and tried to control it for his own pleasure and convince her it was okay and natural. He was trying to turn her into his own personal plaything
The ninth method or technique is Exploiting the Child’s Own Sensuality
My father spent 5 years grooming and training my daughter to trust what he was doing was okay. He used his authority as a grandparent and someone she loved to tell her everything that he was doing was okay and that he would never hurt her he would tell her this is what love is and it was supposed to feel good, he would tell her your mom and dad do this, it’s completely normal. And he also told her to” stop tensing up”,” stop closing your legs”, “stop crying” and “bleeding is normal, just put a pad on it”.
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When my daughter was done highlighting the article with everything my father had done, I realized he had used every known method of manipulation and grooming that pedophiles and child abusers use. Had this not come out when it did, I know my daughter would have spent a week over Christmas being drugged and abused my father, just like he said he would.
Had I ever read a story like this to my father, or had it popped up on the news, while we were sitting together watching TV, I know he would have condemned the man responsible, referring to him as someone who should be shot…even after everything he had already done, and would have continued to do.
On the day all of this came to light, he had been sending my daughter messages about how excited he was, because I had personally told him the day before that I had made flight reservations and we would be there for a week. Some of the messages were sent while he sat in a church pew, watching a Christmas program.
He had no idea that I had already found out what he had done and was just waiting to confirm it with my daughter and that I would be boarding a plane within a few hours to confront him.
My family contends that my daughter’s participation in this abuse was consensual, maybe they believe that, or maybe they don’t.
I do not know.
Maybe they feel that he has brain damage and it is their only hope of saving my father from a life sentence and they are willing to sacrifice my daughter to save him.
But I do not know.
Or, maybe they are all just caught in the middle, not knowing what to do, being dragged along by all of this chaos, feeling like they have no choice.
Just like my daughter.
But I honestly do not know.